Lynis is an open source security auditing tool. Its main goal is to audit and harden Unix and Linux based systems. It scans the system by performing many security control checks. Examples include searching for installed software and determine possible configuration flaws.

Many tests are part of common security guidelines and standards, with on top additional security tests. After the scan, a report will be displayed with all discovered findings. To provide you with initial guidance, a link is shared to the related Lynis control.

Lynis is one of the most trusted automated auditing tool for software patch management, malware scanning and vulnerability detecting in Unix/Linux based systems. This tool is useful for auditors, network and system administrators, security specialists and penetration testers.

How Lynis works:

In this Kali Linux Tutorial , To run it at the first time, it is recommended to use -c paramater. -c parameter means doing all tests to check the systems. If you want to put the Auditor name, just add –auditor parameter there. Here’s some

Run lynis with categories

If you feel that put a lot of Test-IDs is painful, you can use –test-category parameter. With this option, Lynis will run Test-IDs which included inside specific category. For example, you want to run Firewall and Kernel tests. Then you can do this :

# ./lynis –tests-category “firewalls kernel”

Run Lynis as Cronjob

Since security need to be consistent, you can automate Lynis to run periodically. Let say, you want to run it every month to see is there any improvement since the last Lynis run.

To do this, we can run Lynis as cronjob. Here’s a sample cronjob to run it every month.

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